On the cloud front, Canonical’s announced compatibility with OpenStack APIs for both internal, Ubuntu-hosted or external clouds speaks to Canonical's attempts to make Ubuntu instances a default choice. (Watch a slideshow version of this story.)

On the client side, Ubuntu’s Unity GUI starts to go places where Ubuntu-derivative/associated distros like Linux Mint cannot: onto smartphones and tablets. It took pains for us to obtain a smartphone that would run Ubuntu 13.10, but the Nexus 4 we used is essentially identical in functionality to installations we put on notebooks and virtual machines.